listo

I had a cypres fire once. I was under a good canopy and F#*&@$ up by spiralling too low with a student cypres. I fired it and ended up with an instant downplane. Moral of the story......I F'd up! One vote for ------------->stupidity. I admit it. Will I ever do it again..........nope! Do I still jump with a cypres.......you betcha! If I can be stupid once, I might do it again. Thank God for a cypres......they save idiots like me. Listo

I agree....but who in the hell is strong enough to throw a planet at me? I throw myself at a planet and at some point chicken out and throw a pilot chute, but if some dude is big enough to throw a planet at me, I am just going to shoot him and run like hell. Live today as tomorrow may not come

I am not trying to "defeat" anyone in any way. I feel very strongly that altimeters should be worn on every dive, by everyone, even if they aren't going to use it, but that in no way is suggesting that I am 100% correct with my view. However, it does seem to be the general consensus that the majority of people who are reading this seem to agree with me. I think that you would find the general population of skydivers would agree with me as well. If the USPA knew that there were hundreds of people jumping without altimeters....I think they would make it mandatory. After all, the USPA's main focus is safety. Quite honestly, I find it to be dangerous advice to suggest to someone to jump without an altimeter. If they are going to use it or not depends on them, but just in case they have to, it would be a darn good idea to have it. There is no room on a skydive for "I wish.....". It is simply cut and dry that proper safety equipment needs to accompany every skydiver on every skydive. There are really good alternatives to learning how to judge altitude visually without being in lack of proper gear. Quite honestly, I think that jumping without an altimeter is just the same as not jumping with a helmet. You may not need it to make your skydive safer, but the one time that you do need it makes all the difference. Listo

Well, I guess in the old days that would have been a wild ride. No wonder the old timers look at canopies swooping across ponds with amazement these days.

well, i have one cut away and I debated whether or not it should count. I fired one of Billy's student cypress while flying a good functioning canopy at about 700 feet. I was spiralling and the darn cheesy thing fired on me causing an instant downplane. The funny thing is that Dr. Bob and Nelson were talking about doing a downplane together but backed out of it. There was skuttle butt going around that I did it on purpose. I promise, I didn't though. Anyway, my tandem I/E said that a cut away is a cut away and wouldn't get the rig from strong for me. DARN! Listo

I will mail you a version of my air, ground, air, ground, hospital. It even has some really good shots of my left femur looking like I have 5 knees instead of 1. Great stuff for the hard headed rookies that won't listen. It happened around jump 200 as well. The funny part is that you can see that if I had about 2 more feet, I would have had one incredible swoop. I just didn't dig when I should have. Great case for a novice to see and to understand that experience is seeing the picture and knowing when it is wrong. I didn't really do a low turn, I just didn't fly it right. PM me with a mailing address of your DZ or where ever you want it sent to. I would be more than happy to try to calm your buddy down a little. It has a great shot of me bouncing 10 back into the air. Total injuries: left femur in 5 pieces, broken and dislocated left hip, compression fractures in three thorasic vertabra Listo

Lyle told me that the skills camp is from sunday-friday and the qualifier is saturday and sunday. Contact Lyle Presse at lyle@skydiving.com to make sure though. Why aren't you going to the Mardi Gras boogie with Sam? Listo Live today as tomorrow may not come

well, hind site is always 20/20. It could be said that he was wrong for going head down, but at the same time, you could have been wrong for not going to your belly and tracking away when you reallized that you couldn't keep up. Always go to the low man on a free fly jump. After all, you don't want someone corking up into you. A barrell roll at the end of any track to pull situation is a good thing. The fact that your buddy did that probably saved both of you. It is a really good idea to do it on any jump, but even more important on free fly jumps because of the fact the free flying is 3 dimensional. Always clear your space before dumping. Listo

The main purpose is to demonstrate that you aren't afraid to cut away and go to a second canopy. It would kind of look funny to have a tandem master burn in cause they had never cut away and were afraid to. It might sound weird to have that reasoning, but that is what I was told by my Tandem IE anyway. Listo

Can that really be blamed on the altimeter though. Sounds more like a botched landing. Listo

Bill, can we lock this one? I believe that the subject has been covered. I don't think that there is anything else to really be added to this. Both sides of the story have been addressed. I don't want to see this turn into a fiasco. After all, the original thread was about students and there has been a lot of discussion about experienced jumpers. I don't want to give students the wrong idea. The USPA mandates that all students must wear an altimeter and a student is classified as anyone without an A license or higher. Granted, not everyone that reads this is affilliated with the USPA, but I am and I care mostly about USPA members, as I do not know fully the rules and regs for other affilliations. I do not want to step on any toes of our foriegn brethren. Thank you, Listo Live today as tomorrow may not come

I didn't see myself argueing in the least. Personally, I would dispose of it or send it back to the manufacturer to be recalibrated. I have owned two visual altimeters. Neither one ever broke, but when I noticed that my first one was consistantly 500' off, I replaced it. If I ever have any doubt of whether or not my alti is out of calibration, the next jump is with two other altimeters to check it out. All of this is in conjunction with my audible too. I might find that it is my audible that is acting up. To everyone: However, this has not one thing to do with the initial thread that I started in here. So, can we keep it on subject please. Listo

to answer your question......my "fear" was of being too low or not having enough time to deal with a malfunction. I have hit the ground before and I know how dang bad it hurts. I don't ever care to do it again. I would venture to say that you haven't broken any bones while skydiving. If you had, then you could appreciate my "fear" and respect it. Live today as tomorrow may not come

I am not going to get into a debate of who is right or wrong here.......but I do believe that there are more people in this thread that have the same views as I do. There are just more posts from those who disagree with me, don't confuse that with the number of opinions. Last time I checked, the same opinion stated numerous times doesn't count more than the number of people with given opinions. I just care enough to get the message out to low timers that it is a good idea to always wear an altimeter and that learning visual refferencing is better and more accurately done when it is cross ref'd with an altimeter. Good day to you sir. Listo EDIT: Actually, I just went back and read through the entire thread and concluded that only 6 of 29 people who posted to this thread differ in opinion with me. I might also add that of those 6, a few weren't really saying anything about students jumping without altimeters. Another thing about those same 6 is that a few of those are also students defending their dropzones policies.

we went out 3.5 or 4 miles, but the winds were honking all the way down to about 6,500 (45 mph). We all decided that we needed to fly on our bellies just in case we ended up short so we could pull higher if we needed to. We didn't want anyone getting hosed. Usually, we have our leader fly on their backs, but not on this one because we were so far out. We made the airport by 5,500, so our timing must have been pretty good. We had a bunch of really good trackers too. The average fall speed on the jump was 96mph vertically on a pro-track. Now just for grins, I figured out the average forward speed and it came to 173 mph. Now keep in mind that the uppers were crankin at around 70 mph. My guess is that we were tracking just over 100 mph horizontally. I have always been horrible at math, so does anyone want to cross check me on that? That actually sounds a little bit off to me. Listo

You people can argue this till beer is free all around the world on mondays. I still say that EVERYONE needs to wear a freakin altimeter of some sort on every dive. If you choose not to use, well that one is up to you, but do our sport a favor to help us from looking bad if you go in for some reason. I have over 2,000 pack jobs and not one of them has ever resulted in a reserve ride. Over 600 of them I have jumped myself. The only reserve ride that I have to my credit came from a student cypres fire under a good canopy. I was simply spiralling too low and fired the darn thing. I had an instant downplane and didn't care how high I was, I just needed to fix it. There are times when you should just react and then there are times when an altimeter is a good referrence. I have seen days when out of nowhere, the little cessna took forever to climb to alitude and by the time we checked the spot and made the 10,500 foot freefall, there was a heavy haze layer that really obstructed depth perception to the point that it was impossible to judge how high we were. I thought for sure that layer was from 5,500-3,500. As it turned out, that layer was from 2,500-1,500. It had built up just as quick as it took us to climb to altitude. We could still see the ground and landmarks, but none the less. Everyone on the load was "dead" wrong about where it was. If we had all not been wearing altimeters or if we had all made seperate exits, then everyone one of us would have been low as shit and someone might have gotten hurt. Moral of the story:You don't have to look at your altimeter if you don't want to, but at least wear the thing just in case you decide that it might not be such a bad idea to check it. Once you leave an airplane, it is too late to decide that having an altimeter would be a good idea. If you want to teach someone how to use their eyes. Give them an altimeter and tell them to cross ref their guesses. They will learn much faster. The chances of the altimeter working are much greater than they are for it to malfunction. Above all else, good ole common sense applies to everything. As for the old time skydivers.....well a lot more of them are dead per capita than the new generation. Reasons might be a lot different, but none the less. I trust my own judgement and I was taught to do that from jump number one. My instructors all had thousands of jumps with perfect safety records and everyone of them drilled into our little newbie heads that altimeters were required equipment. After all, it just fell into the category of good ole common sense. You people talk about wanting to keep our sport self regulated.....well maybe you need to address the carelessness so we don't end up having more regulation imposed on us because people are being stupid and not wearing proper safety equipment. It will only be a matter of time that things change. Keep doing the stupid stuff and it will change faster.....I promise. I love my freedom, but I don't take advantage of it and I don't do things that make it look like I don't deserve to have it. "Ignorance is bliss" --unknown, but they must have been smart Listo

If you have an altimeter that ever reads as much as 1,000 feet off, you need to throw it in the next bond fire you are hanging out around. I have never seen an altimeter read that far off. That is either a case of a malfunctioning altimeter or someone that has consumed too much beer and is telling stories again. Live today as tomorrow may not come

no wonder Chuck switched over to PD...... Live today as tomorrow may not come

have you ever taken a longer spot and done a downwind tracking dive.....pretty cool stuff to see the ground flying by when you are just flying your body. We had 70 kt uppers the other day at 15,000 and we did a 12-way tracking dive whooooohooooo! Live today as tomorrow may not come

well, my femur just looked like a rifle bullet had hit it, there wasn't anything big enough to come through the skin. Good ole Papa Morphine kept my sense of humor going though. The EMTs asked how tall I was......I told them "about 30 mins before hand I was 6'4, but at the moment, I think that 4'6" is a safe guess" Well.....they thought it was funny anyway. that's a killer idea! no pun intended my video of it is bad enough. My friend was videoing everyone's landings that day. It was a typical "hey ya'll watch this....get the camera ready" ......little did I know Live today as tomorrow may not come

Tombuch, this is not directed at you. I am just using your statement. Thank you for posting it. Man, gotta love the good ole USPA. They care about their members I guess. Has everyone in here seen the movie "Friday"? If not go rent it so you can see where I am about to go with my next comment. If anyone of these fools in here goes in not wearing an alti, will someone please call me before you move the body so I can stand over them, put my finger in their face and say "you jus, burnt, da F*** IN!" ha ha haaaaaa I can't believe that I am hearing the moronic statements in here about this. If you don't want to look at your alti in free fall or under canopy, fine. Go ahead, but do the rest of us a favor and wear an altimeter so you don't look quite as stupid as you are. I in no way will ever say that it is a good idea to send up a student without an alitmeter and no amount of ignorant statements will EVER change my opinion on that one folks. You might as well save your finger energy for my sake. The assumption was made that I am device dependant. Well, to be honest I am not. I use my eyes mostly. However, I have hundreds of jumps of cross refferencing my guesses with that device and I am pretty accurate now. Students don't have that experience. If I have a malfunction, the first thing I look at is my altimeter. I want to know how much time I have to work with. Am I lower than I thought. Did my canopy snivel longer than usuall. Not that it really matters, but how many of you people who advocate jumping without an altimeter jump seasonally vs. year round jumping. More importantly, how many of you jump 52 weekends a year? This should be interesting. People the bottom line is this. If you want to teach someone how to use their senses for altitude awareness then they have to use a device to cross referrence it. Airplane flight instructors don't mess up an airplane when someone is going through training to simulate emergencies. Why should we send someone up with a faulty altimeter or no altimeter at all. It is the same thing. It is plain out idiotic to tell someone to guess how high they are. Sure, you can see when you need to pull. Almost any idiot can see that, but someone with only 4-5 jumps doesn't know diddly about altitude. If it sounds like I am peaved about this.....well, kind of. Is there anything I can do to keep it from happening.....not if I don't see it. I don't care how things were done back in the days of Moses. This is 2003 and we should know how important safety is. I am not going to advocate someone to go out and stare at an altimeter for a whole dive to know how high they are, but geeze, it is one hell of a good idea to have that little device. If you want to be one of the people who advocate jumping without an altimeter, then I will take great pleasure to keep on saying that it is plain out STUPID and so are you for not wearing it. If you don't want to look at it, fine, but at least wear the thing. what is it going to hurt? This is the last post I am putting in this thread. I don't think I can go on any further without breaking the rules and calling a few people what they really are. If I have offended anyone in here by my views, well tough. Stupidity and ignorance offend me. To all of the low timers and students who read this. I say to trust your judgement and common sense. If you think an altimeter is a good idea, then demand to wear one and don't ever let anyone convince you otherwise. After all, it is your butt that is jumping out of that airplane, not theirs. "A closed mind is a wonderful thing to waist" Listo

yeah, no kidding........you mean like every one of the 400+ hooks I have done since I started doing 'em again. Live today as tomorrow may not come

yeah, I have seen that too. I constantly remind my tall passengers to not stand up in the otter. I have had my head banged on the ceiling quite a few times. I am more worried about dragging the rig though. Live today as tomorrow may not come

well, I strongly disagree with you. I think that it should be mandatory for every jumper to have a visual and audible altimeter. After all, what are the chances of two altimeters failing on the same jump, much less three altimeters. Dytters are about the same cost as a really good altimeter. I personally always have at least two altimeters of some sort on me at all times. I know where I am in the air and never have to guess. I don't worry about going lower than I planned or endangering someone else because I wanted to guess my altitude. I will be the first to tell a reporter that a dz and an instructor were morons for not having a student wear at least one type of altimeter and that poor instruction could well have been linked to that student getting hurt. If we are talking about an experienced jumper, well I would tell that reporter that the jumper in question didn't follow a good safety regimen and I am not suprised that he/she went in. Ignorance has no place in skydiving! unfortunately, there are too many ignorant souls in this sport and I take pleasure in helping them realize it.

the funny thing is.....I am 6'4" and 205. So I just had to bite the bullet so to speak. The good thing is that I can't take anyone over 240. However, since I am big, I always get stuck with the huge pieces of "meat". The little guys are afraid to take to 200+ pounders. lol Gotta earn a buck however you can I guess. Live today as tomorrow may not come